Well well well. It has been a minute, hasn’t it.
I’ve got a bit of a train of thought I’d like to go into about the Starcraft Tabletop Miniatures Game, but we’ll get to that. For the moment, I knew one thing for certain: I needed to try this game as soon as possible.
Thankfully with the beta rules available and some awesome work done to adjust the most popular 40K tabletop simulator mod to work with the game, SCTMG is playable in a remarkably pleasant to use format, especially if you’re already comfortable using Hutber’s 40K mod. So, I got together with Ben, who you may know from his many Conquest reports and is as excited as I am about this game, and we got some models onto a virtual table.
We began our foray into the SCTMG with a pair of full-scale, 2000 point games. The first was really testing the waters, and while I originally intended to batrep it, we realized so many mistakes going all the way back to list building, much less on the table, that while it was a lot of fun it was frankly kind of a mess. So, we re-racked and played out a second game, which felt much closer to the mark of what its all about.
Ben and I are both Protoss-heads at heart, but he was interested in trying out Terran so I was the one to get to put our golden boys on the table for the very first time. Let us take a look at the lists.
Chandler’s Khalai Protoss
UNITS
Artanis
4 Adepts
–Resonating Glaives
3×3 Zealots
–My Life for Aiur
–Leg Enhancements
3 Praetor Guard
2 Sentries
–Solid-Field Projectors
–Hallucination
2 Stalkers
–Path of Shadows
-Fury of the Nerazim
1 Stalker
–Path of Shadows
–Fury of the Nerazim
TACTIC CARDS
Gateway Chronoboosted
Twilight Council
Warp Prism
Warp Gate
Forge
You might recognize this list as ‘a bunch of the handful of models that exist.’
Jokes aside, I like this unit balance a fair bit. While Zealots are your tier 1 basic combat unit in the strategy game, they function quite well as a late game anchor, as we’ll see in the batrep. Sentries are interesting but I’m still getting a feel for them, but they did do some good work, though I struggle to imagine taking more than a unit of two. We didn’t play with Stalkers in our first game, so this was a chance to try them out. I have some opinions on my tactics card layout but we’ll get to that later.
Ben’s Raynor’s Raiders Terran
UNITS
Jim Raynor
6 Marines
–Shields
–Slugthrower
–Frag Grenades
2×6 Marines
–Slugthrower
–Frag Grenades
2×3 Marauders
-Veteran
–Kinetic Foam
6 Raynor’s Raiders
1 Goliath
–Ares-Class Targeting System
–Scatter Missiles
2×3 Medics
–Stabilizer Medpacks
TACTIC CARDS
Academy
Barracks
Proxy Barracks
Dropship
Armory
Factory
A solid marine-centric build, pretty much the tried and true Marine/Medic/Marauder bio build anyone whose watched competitive Terran in SC2 has seen a thousand times. Turns out, these work pretty well on the table as well, and of course we have a Goliath acting as a heavier fire support addition.
While the game features a draft system for scenario, we kept this random for now. This was mostly to just reduce what we were concerned about initially, and frankly we are far too inexperienced for a drafting process to be much more than arbitrary, but I’m sure we’ll add it in to our typical game later on. Ben won a roll off to take initiative in the first round, and we started the first round.
ROUND 1 – TERRAN INITIATIVE
This game really gets started quick.
As Protoss, I have a lot of ways to really game deployment, but he has a fair amount of shenanigans built into his list. Between Raynor’s Raiders faction card ability “Ready for Pickup?”, his Dropship, Raynor’s ability to manipulate activation tokens with “Orders”, and Raynor’s Raiders Marines innate “Rapid Reinforcements” rule, he isn’t helpless to be able to get around the table. That said, Protoss are just unparalleled here, as they should be.
Ben made a large commitment to the top left side, initially starting with a pair of Marauders moving on to the table with his Proxy Barracks “Armed and Ready” ability. My Stalkers deployed normally to counter them, moving up quite aggressively, but then between Marines using “Stimpack” and Raynor’s “Orders,” a ton of stuff ended up on that side, pressing my Stalkers to use their “Path of Shadows rule to gain Hidden and avoid being attacked. I placed my Pylon near the center but not super aggressively, and got a pair of Sentries out early to take control of the objective. They would become a core part of how this game played out going forward. They do get shot by Raynor and take a bit of damage.
His Goliath moved in on the right side. I moved a Stalker up in a hidden position to be able to counter it, and I used the Warp Prism’s “Warp Conduit” ability to end the round with a set of Praetor Guard in a position to take early control of that objective and threaten the Goliath. My Sentries farm the objective for points, and his Marauders and Marines do the same up in the corner, but with me controlling an additional objective, we end the turn with a score of 5-4, Protoss favor.
ROUND 2 – TERRAN INITIATIVE
Round 2 is when a lot of things were going to really kick into gear.
Ben started making an aggressive push for the central objective so he could start scoring on it with the gather action. I decided to take advantage of his extreme push to the top corner by having my Sentries drop a force field in his ideal path outwards to threaten my main staging objective, then had Artanis use his “Phase Prism” ability to deploy in their place, sending them back to reserves. Then, the Pylon’s “Warp Conduit” ability allows me to place Adepts in a pretty aggressive position on the table.
The Adepts use their “Psionic Transfer” rule to drop a shade up near Raynor and his Marine squad near the center. My Stalker and Praetor Guard on the right move up aggressively, the Praetor Guard using the “Leg Enhancements” ability I purchased for them to move much more quickly than normal, getting an extra 2″ move. My Stalkers near the top left abandon that side and begin shifting around towards the center, although I’m low on resources and can’t use any effects to move them up more aggressively, so they struggle to get very good range on the Marines. Ben passes in the move phase quite early this round, his top left units largely opting to just farm that objective for points.
The shooting phase is where the Terran really do their work, but his doesn’t go terribly well. The Goliath shoots the Praetor Guard but with their “Shield Overcharge” ability letting them change two failed armor saves to successes, they’re just a tough unit to work through. The Adepts lose their shields to Marine fire, but I trigger the “Weapons of the Firstborn” ability on the Twilight Council to bump their range up to 12, pay for the “Resonating Glaives” ability I purchased in list building for +1 to their rate of fire, and with their anti-light surge they rip through four of the six marines on the center. Raynor puts his shots into Artanis, taking some points off his shields.
My Stalker down on the bottom right takes a chunk out of the Goliath with its anti-armor surge, and once the Praetor Guard make their charge in, its fate is sealed and their “Titan Killers” rule, doubling their damage into Size 3+ targets, rips the machine apart. Between his impact hits and attacks, Artanis, despite him attacking Jim Raynor feeling very wrong, leaves the backwater marshal on 3 wounds remaining. Overall, I felt like it was a very solid turn for the Protoss. His Dropship drops a squad of marines on the blue objective in the bottom right, but that one doesn’t score on this scenario, they’re just in a contesting position. While I am dominating the objectives, his constant farming in the top left is keeping him quite close to me, ending the turn at 9-8, Protoss favor.
ROUND 3 – TERRAN INITIATIVE
This is the turn where Ben really finally starts getting to bring his tools to bear, and will be the sign of a shift in momentum. He uses his Dropship to airlift his squad of Marines stuck up in the top left out of the hole they’re in, and uses the “Ready for Pickup?” rule on his faction card to end up with some very aggressive Marauders near the center, threatening my Stalkers with their anti-armor attacks. The Stalkers had previously used their “Blink” ability to cross over some walls and get very near the center. I re-deploy my Sentries near the Pylon and replace their forcefield yet again, keeping the box around the models in that corner. Adepts move up and shade towards the bottom right, and the squad of Marines he had picked up from the corner earlier walk in from his deployment edge, beginning to threaten that right side.
The real issue here is the Medics have arrived, and they heal Raynor with their “Medpack” ability, boosted by the “Stabilizer Medpacks” ability he had purchased. This means Artanis went from quite trivially killing the marshal to being stuck in combat for quite a while longer. Further, they are now threatening to use their “Life Support” reaction to heal a huge chunk of damage I do to the Marauders. Medics are absolutely nasty, it’s wild how tough they make the otherwise relatively killable Terran units.
I place my Warp Prism’s “Warp Conduit” token a bit south of the center. It’s a somewhat non-committal location that lets me either threaten the center, or use resources if I want to actually push the right side with the blinding speed Zealots get when you spend some psi energy on them.
Oh god upgraded Marines hurt.
His marines in the bottom right use their “Frag Grenades” ability to gain a d6 surge die on my Praetor Guard and absolutely tear them apart, cleanly annihilating the unit for 2 points on scenario. I have my Adepts shoot at the Medic unit, killing 3 of them, and my Stalkers are able to use the reduced defensiveness caused by less medics to kill a Marauder. My Stalker on the bottom right charges into the Marines mostly just to engage them and as part of taking over the objective. Artanis flails at Raynor, doing considerable damage to bring him down to 2 wounds remaining, and takes a few points in return from shooting.
Yeah, yeah, I know that’s out of order, I’m telling a story, leave me alone.
Unfortunately the healing to Raynor is making that far more of an even fight than I wanted it to be.
Between my dead Praetor Guard, farming the northwest objective, and me failing to quite kill anything, even though I’m ahead on objectives, Ben is pulling ahead on points. We end the turn 14-13, Terran favor.
ROUND 4 – PROTOSS INITIATIVE
Well, one upside is my Praetor Guard dying lets me get more Zealots onto the table?
I have one really good turn in me left to try and re-gain control of the game. The downside is I have to weather shooting from quite a bit of Marines down on in the bottom right. Raynor’s Raiders Marines drop in on the objective I’ve controlled all game, threatening to take those points away from me that I desperately need. Further, his Dropship picks up the Medics on the top right, freeing them from their eternal prison.
I do have a few plays in me. One helpful thing is I don’t need to move much, meaning I can try and maintain initiative. I deploy a squad of Zealots up by my Pylong to threaten either finishing off the Medic, Marauder, or Raynor depending on how things go. I end up doing none of those and go a different route, but here we are.
More Zealots come in using the Warp Gate’s “Warp In” ability in the bottom right. I replace my forcefield again, but I leave my Stalkers and Adepts where they are, giving me the opportunity to pass just before Ben does, giving me initiative heading into the Assault Phase.
The remainder of the turn doesn’t go awfully, exactly, but it more maintained a status quo in which I’m losing so it isn’t what I need. The first big issue is my Zealots in the center fail their charge, needing a 2 on the die, into the Marines engaging the Stalker. Thankfully the Stalker does shoot and do pretty well, killing 3 which does reduce their supply to 0 for control purposes, so I’ve got that going for me. The Adepts do well saving against the big marine squad on the right and they kill a couple models out of the unit, but I really needed more damage there. Unfortunately surge dice have been pretty bad for me all game, typically rolling a 1 and only occasionally a 2, and not once did I roll a 3 on a surge.
Artanis continues to slapfight a Raynor that is continously healing, but is ending the turn on a single wound while Raynor is still half alive. My Stalker shoot his other Marauder to death, and my Zealots that deployed from the Pylon clean up the two marines in the center. Sadly, the Zealot squad I deployed to counter Raynor’s Raiders gets completely cleaned up by them, causing me to entirely lose that side of the table.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know the exact score anymore at this point, but I was down by a couple points. We need a seriously good turn 5, and I do control the center of the table pretty soundly and can hopefully push out from there, but I need a few things to go my way.
ROUND 5 – THINGS DON’T GO MY WAY
I think I had some quite clever plays this turn.
I had opportunities this turn but two main things didn’t go my way.
So the important things this turn was that I had the Adepts send their shade way down to the bottom right, then moved to the center. My Stalker engaging the Marines on the blue objective Blinked away to contest that red objective. If I had allocated resources better, I could have healed him for 2 with the Twilight Council’s “Veil of Shadows” ability when I did this, but I used it on points elsewhere, which proves to be a game-losing mistake.
My Zealots near the center move up and charge into two Medic squads. If I kill one with their “Devastating Charge” ability, I can allocate their attacks into the 3 model squad and hopefully kill it. Unfortunately, the 3 model squad protects the single medic and it stays alive. His Raynor’s Raiders Marines shoot my Stalker contesting the bottom right objective and kill it to the wound, meaning if I had healed it with the Twilight Council it would have lived. The play there was that my Adepts would collect resources for points on the center, then at end of turn use the Shade’s ability to let them teleport to its location, giving me 2 supply on the objective, but with the Stalker dead the best I can do is contest it, which scores me nothing and isn’t helpful.
My Zealots on the right do charge the 4 man squad and absolutely tear it apart with “Devastating Charge,” their attacks cleaning up one more model. So that’s nice.
Artanis finally falls to Raynor’s revolver. He just couldn’t outpace the healing.
In the end, however… I end up losing this game by a single point, with an end score of 26-25. An insanely close game that really came down to the absolute last activations.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Normally this is where I would get really into the details of my list and the game and talk about my decision making throughout, but honestly that wasn’t really the point of this game. It is difficult to put into words how excited Ben and I are for this game. While I can’t speak to Ben’s whole experience, I know he is experienced with Starcraft and has loved the series for a long time, but in my case…no game ever really did for me what Starcraft did as a kid. This is one of the most important IPs to me that exists, and unfortunately it hasn’t really been handled as well as I would have liked over the past couple of decades. Being excited about a Starcraft product again has breathed new life into me in a pretty crazy way. While initially I was very pessimistic, every single thing about this game I’ve seen and heard from Archon Studios has surprised and excited me more and more with each day.
So, how is it?
While there are rough edges, a few bits of which I will mention, this game is fantastic to actually play. My initial concerns on paper were that lethality would be just insanely high, with any unit that attacks first just killing whatever it shot into, but that’s truly not the case. We both still had a fair bit of army on the table even in what felt like a high-aggression, high-violence game with a lot of attacks going both ways. Zealots feel like they did back in the Brood War days, where even in small numbers, and even as a tier 1 gateway unit, they are just so tough and remarkably murdery. Protoss feels elite and also very tricky and technologically powerful in the way they should, while Terran exhibit that rugged, utility-first playstyle with a punishing amount of gunfire that I would expect from them. The core identity and feel of this game is fantastic, and really evokes I think exactly what the development team was going for.
Any criticisms I would have are mostly around formatting information. We had some small problems identifying the actual sizes of units (I played my first game with Adepts being units of 2 which really makes that unit a lot worse,) but once we figured out how the card was formatted and what it was going for, it isn’t unclear exactly, at the very least isn’t hard to infer. Protoss seem to overlap the rule Precision quite a bit, and in some cases I felt like I was deciding how to use a resource to gain two different effects that felt largely the same in end goal (+1 attack versus precision 2 on Adepts… they already get Precision 1 from the shade and these don’t stack….), but this is somewhat minor and I think will get better as more things are added to the game. Some upgrades feel hard to really apply, one example off the top of my head is the Zealot “We Stand as One” upgrade, which is yet another source of Precision 2, but it’s hard to gang up on single units in the way the rule asks for given Protoss’s core identity as a hyper-elite army.
We weren’t sure in this scenario if multiple units could farm the same objective, leading to a situation where 2-3 units are sitting on an objective scoring 4-5 points from it over and over. In the end it didn’t feel too bad playing that way, but it took some of the bite out of what I felt like was me capitalizing on opponents positioning by using forcefields to trap him in. Forcefields in general feel a little awkward against Terran, a very shooting heavy army, but I think Sentries just need more reps from me as they aren’t as easy to use as a lot of the rest of the Protoss range.
Artanis is one of my favorite characters in Starcraft but I’m uncertain how I feel about him. His Pylon feels like more of a big hero than him in some respects, being able to deploy my units very aggressively, but as he is he’s really just a guy that charges and does okay damage. If he has charged in and is stuck in melee combat with something he needs to chew through, he has no interesting utility or abilities. With the change to his “Lightning Dash” ability that makes him unable to use “Devastating Charge” a second time, that ability is interesting but feels like it would be sitting just under the ideal benefit case. That all said, the right way for me to play him into Terran here is probably as a lightning rod to be a non-typed unit that can take an enormous amount of damage using his “Hierarch’s Stand” ability to jump in front of ranged attacks for my units. It just feels like I wish he had one more interesting utility ability of some kind, though.
Adepts might be the greatest unit in all of miniature wargaming. The “Psionic Transfer” ability to send out a shade and possibly teleport to it later is such an absolutely perfect take on how they work in Starcraft 2, while also being insanely fun and open to so much creative use by players. I adore this units design, I would maybe say that “Resonating Glaives” shouldn’t cost a psi energy to use, just be a passive +1 RoA to their Glaive cannon, as Protoss already feel insanely energy starved, but at the end of the day I think they could go either way on that. The 8 attacks the unit gets normally just feel a bit inconsistent.
Overall, I am very excited about this game. Ben and I will hopefully be getting quite a few more games in. I’m very much looking forward to trying out Zerg, a race I’ve never really enjoyed in the strategy game but their implementation here looks fantastic.
Thanks all for reading, and I hope to see you next time.
